Jail time for Dirty Dirt - who's next?

How many communities have to be poisoned and criminal convictions have to occur before common sense prevails?

Bill Wolfe

In a little noticed but what could be a major story, on Friday the Trenton Times reported that:

"A contractor who dumped more than 400 loads of contaminated soil from Trenton at a farm in Moorestown and tried to conceal the disposal with false documents was sentenced yesterday to three years in prison."

A key fact buried in the story is that neither DEP nor State DOT detected the crime:

"A tip made to the Burlington County Health Department prompted the investigation."

We have written about significant problems due to lax State oversight of the illegal disposal of toxic contaminated soils, most recently in a Bergen Record Op-Ed:

"Playing with dirty dirt.

Bill Wolfe

Contractors imported thousands of cubic yards of toxic sludge, contaminated soil and highly questionable "recyclable materials" that were used as clean fill or landfill-capping material. This made existing toxic problems at the site far worse. Press reports disclosed that DEP lacked even a basic ability to monitor contaminated materials imported to the site.

A similar lack of DEP oversight at the cleanup of the Ford plant in Edison resulted in PCB-contaminated soils and demolition debris being used as clean fill at 19 housing projects in central New Jersey.

These same practices not only continue across our state; they are encouraged and subsidized by DEP.

We are spending millions of dollars to clean up toxic soils, only to allow scam operators to "launder" and dump them in someone else's backyard. This is insane. These materials require strict management to ensure they are safely handled."

Bill WolfeMartin Luther King, Jr. School site in Trenton (this is old school, not new construction that was demolished).

Importation of toxic soils forced demolition of the partially built Martin Luther King, Jr. elementary school in Trenton, at a $27 million loss to taxpayers.

Similarly, PCB contaminated soil from a DEP "supervised" cleanup at the Ford plant in Edison was used as "clean fill" at 19 residential construction sites in central NJ. The PCB tainted soil had to be excavated and properly disposed at a cost of millions. This fiasco triggered legislative oversight hearings, where we warned DEP and legislators of the need to "impose cradle-to-grave management requirements for contaminated soils and demolition waste". (See:

Yet despite the loss of millions of taxpayer dollars, significant risks to health and the environment, and a widespread ongoing pattern of fraud and abuse that is enabled by lax DEP regulatory oversight, DEP and Legislature have done NOTHING to tighten oversight, monitoring or enforcement to fix the problems that have been exposed.

Worse, the Corzine Administration, backed by democratic legislators, is seeking to privatize toxic site cleanup, which would further weaken already lax DEP oversight and lead to even more serious scandals. See: